A follow-up to Productivity Hacks I’ve Discovered Since College Part 1: Commitment Devices. Here are habits that have helped me make better decisions.Setting budgets to make trade-offs more intuitive.
It’s hard to decide what is a worthwhile expense and what isn’t. Is
eating out tonight worth spending an extra $10? What’s $10 worth,
anyway? One reason this sort of question is so hard to answer, as
suggested in Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir’s book Scarcity,
is that it’s unclear what exactly I’ll have to give up if I spend $10
today. It will chip into my savings and mean that I’ll have less to
spend in the future, or maybe it will increase the risk that if a health
catastrophe hits, I won’t be able to pay for the medical care I need.
These costs are abstract and far away, so it’s hard to make smart
tradeoffs. [2]
After graduating college, I figured out how much I would need to
spend on rent and taxes, allocated 10% of my income to charity and
$5,000 a year to savings, and subtracted how much I estimated I would
spend on food and necessary home and school supplies. What was left over
was for “fun”. I initially allocated myself a “fun budget” of $100 per
month, and dropped this number to $70. [3] Up to $70, I spend money as
if it doesn’t cost me anything except using up my “fun budget”, and over
$70 I’m done.
Over time, it became much more clear which activities have high
funness per dollar. I now know what I would do with a marginal
fun-directed dollar, which helps realistically evaluate the costs of the
tradeoffs I face. Seeing a $5 comedy show? That is much better than
spending $5 on anything else I can think of. $18 for a few hours of rock
climbing? That’s a few delicious meals. A trip to visit my cousin in
Providence… now that buys a lot of falafel!Costs and cognitive constraints
The main drawback of this policy is that I can’t budget optimally.
Some months I don’t have much use for spending money on fun, but I spend
it anyway. Some months I could use a lot more fun money, but I don’t
have it. Large expenses are nearly impossible. I do permit myself to
borrow and save between months, but I try to avoid it: $70 per month is
much easier to think about than $8,400 decade, so I think about it on a
monthly basis.Planning in advance and writing everything in a place I look at frequently
I put everything on my Google Calendar on Sunday nights, print the
calendar, and carry it around with me for the rest of the week. Now I
almost never miss appointments; in the past I missed at least half of
the appointments I scheduled that didn’t happen repeatedly.
I also keep a to-do list, which I have been doing for years. However,
it’s not very helpful because I haven’t been able to get into the habit
of frequently looking at my list the way I frequently check my
calendar. When I need to remember something really important I write it
on my hand, but it’s amazing how often I don’t notice that something is
written on my hand. It’s more amazing how long I can walk around without
anyone going “Hey, Liz, what’s that on your hand?”Setting exercise goals to increase motivation
I exercise because it usually enjoyable, makes me feel better, and
will extend my life. Accordingly, I used to exercise however and
whenever I felt like it. I was a competitive athlete in high school and
was on several teams in college, but for the last few years I’ve avoided
taking exercise too seriously, constantly reminding myself that it is
only useful insofar as it makes me happier or more productive.
This year, I signed up for a difficult trail race (May 10!) and
started training for it. At the beginning of January, I had only been
running ten or fifteen miles a week since I was recovering from an
injury, so I made a plan to slowly build up to the 40 miles a week I
wanted to be at a couple weeks before the race. I planned how how my
weekly mileage and long run distances should increase, and I planned to
periodically run intervals, hill repeats, sprints up Harvard Stadium,
and lift weights in the gym. I wrote down what I did and how I felt
every day. I started out motivated, and having a plan to follow and data
to track has kept me motivated. On the rare days that I’d rather stay
inside, thinking about placing well in the race gets me out the door.
The moral of this story is, pretending that sports is important makes
me feel like it’s important, and feeling like it’s important makes it
more fun.
(Aside: I’m eight weeks into slowly and reasonably increasing my
running mileage. I’m not injured, I’m up to 25 miles a week with a 12
mile long run, and I barely notice hills that used to feel hard. I’m
four weeks into lifting weights twice a week. I’m a lot stronger and can
do thirty-five consecutive nose-to-the-ground push-ups. You serious
athletes can snicker, but I’m proud of myself.)Failures and Unsolved Problems
These are discussed at greater length above, but I think it’s worth
pointing out that “life hacks” have costs and that not everything I try
works.

I don’t remember to look at my to-do list. I write things on it and then don’t do them.

When I initially started setting a “go home and go to bed” alarm, I
set it too late by about 40 minutes. Once I got home, I wouldn’t have
time to hang out with my boyfriend or even chat with him while getting
ready for bed, and I would leave dishes unwashed. Setting the alarm
earlier fixed this, but neither the problem nor the solution was
immediately obvious.

My monthly “fun budget” is inflexible and means that I will
basically never go on an airplane for anything other than work or a
family emergency.

My apartment is usually messier than I want it to be. I feel like I
clean it all the time, but I guess that doesn’t happen as fast as it
gets messier.

And a final caveat:

The fact that everything has been going well for me at once makes me
worry that some other variable than good organizing is driving all
this.

[2] This is an example of the absence of scarcity and is not really what the book is about.
[3] For people on the same stipend as me following along at home, I
overestimated my taxes by a lot. This number could be higher and I’m
going to rebudget after I find out exactly how much I’ll pay in taxes
this year.